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In two new YA novels Vancouver authors Darren Groth and Glenda Leznoff take on coming of age inside and outside the high school bubble.

Are You Seeing Me?

By Darren Groth

Orca Books

Darren Groth’s Are You Seeing Me? ventures into the world beyond the bandwidth of much of young adult fiction with its settings restricted to high school, and typecast categories of characters and shallow concerns (popularity, status, appearance).

The novel packs poignancy, as do its narrators — 19-year-old fraternal twins Justine and Perry Richter whose two-week trip from their Brisbane, Australia home to the Pacific Northwest is funded by the payout of their late father’s life insurance policy. He raised them on this own after their mother fled, overwhelmed by parenting twins, let alone one, Perry, diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder.

Since their father’s death, Justine has been Perry’s sole caregiver, but, after their trip, Perry will be moving into an assisted living residence chosen by their father. So Justine is determined to make this trip “the last time it would be just us” she says, “a memory for the ages” for both of them.

Groth’s narrative strategy is a combination of: Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime, narrated by autistic teen Christopher Boone in which the reader is immersed in the restricted understanding, askew perception and jump cut stream of consciousness; and R. J. Palacio’s Wonder, where she portrays the experience of Augie Pullman, born with facial deformity. Groth’s novel deftly evokes the isolation of being autistic like Perry and Christopher, and breaks through that isolation with the consolation of relationships.

The core of the novel is the relationship between Perry and Justine.

Groth, born in Brisbane, now living in Vancouver with his wife and twins, a daughter and a son with autism spectrum disorder, has said the spark of his novel came from telling his daughter that she is not to see herself as her brother’s keeper.

Often it is the burden of caregiving that is the focus and the source of conflict. Not here. What is so moving about the novel is that Justine is aware of the ceaseless obstacles in taking care of someone with autism, which she relates with black humour, frustration and, most of all, fierce love. For Justine — as it was for her father, whose journal documenting their family’s life since the twins’ birth she is rereading on the trip — caregiving is a gift (on both sides) forging a steel bond of profound attachment.

Consequently she feels abandoned and hurt by Perry’s decision to move into the residence, assuming he is doing so to be independent of her. He is not a burden but an essential part of her life — as she is of his.

Actually Perry is doing so for Justine’s sake. “Justine won’t have to save the day anymore. She will live a normal life. She will be free.” Those misapprehensions — those we make even in the closest of relationships — are the main source of the plot’s conflict.

As Haddon does with Christopher, Groth immerses us in the consciousness of Perry — his obsessions (Jackie Chan movies, mythological sea monsters and earthquakes) detailing his perceptions and feelings in a conventional narrative format for Perry is high functioning and tuned in to the feelings of others, which baffle Christopher.

On their trip they visit Seattle to see Bruce Lee’s grave, Lake Okanagan to see if they will be the lucky ones to sight the lake’s alleged sea monster Ogopogo and Vancouver for a visit (surprise to Perry) with their mother Leonie. Leonie now wants to have a relationship with her children yet she still doesn’t own up to deserting her children, blaming her flight on the fact that their father was a “lousy husband” who didn’t have time for her.

Justine, a realist like her father, and the mature adult her mother still isn’t, pricks her mother’s romanticized notion of Perry as gifted savant. “No, he is just capable,” Justine counters. In this novel, so wise about the intricacies of intimate relationships, they clearly see their mother’s flaws, and forgive them, aware that nurturing is not native to the nature of everyone.

Heartache and Other Natural Shocks

by Glenda Leznoff

Tundra Books

Artist and screenwriter Glenda Leznoff’s debut young adult novel is set on the stage of much teen fiction — high school — and is cast with the familiar players — the brainy good girl, the wild bad girl, the irresistible bad boy. On the plot’s playlist are the customary touchstones — romantic rivalry, experimentation with sex, alcohol and drugs, and parent problems.

Leznoff’s cover of these old standards is given the twist of time — the novel takes place in 1970, a period of political turmoil (the FLQ kidnappings and the burgeoning separatist crusade in Quebec) and cultural (the feminist movement spearheaded by Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique and, in its weird way, her glitzy counterpoint Helen Gurley Brown’s Cosmopolitan magazine).

This is the backdrop for the main event driving the storyline — the school’s production of Hamlet, that quintessential lost soul with parent issues. All this holds the promise of making the familiar fresh.

Fifteen-year-old Jules Epstein is one of the novel’s two narrators.

She is in a sarcastic funk, livid at being uprooted from her friends and life in a vibrant Jewish community in Montreal, and having to move with her mother and younger brother to a bland Toronto suburb. She doesn’t buy her parents claim they are only doing so because of the uptick in hostility to Anglophones in the province.

Jules is set up as the brainy good girl with an edge. In her initial appearances, she has the more interesting mind and personality in comparison with her nemesis, 16-year-old neighbour Carla Cabrielli.

Carla is a wannabe bad girl with a brash, mean mouth — the comic foil to Jules.

Leznoff’s storyline provides ample comedy at her expense at the start — at Carla’s Donald Trump-like self-confidence and self-absorption. Carla is all about working “her assets” — assets honed by following the commands of her goddess Helen Gurley Brown and Cosmopolitan magazine.

The flashpoint for Carla’s and Jules’s rivalry is their attraction to 18-year-old Ian Slater — thrown out of private school and still in Grade 11, as are the girls. Ian is manufactured out of a checklist of bad boy features.

A rich boy with neglectful parents, he dresses in black, drives a motorcycle, is defiant just for the hell of it, drinks and takes drugs. His magnetism will escape most readers as Leznoff never makes him live beyond his formulaic contours.

The bracing vinegar and vigour gradually seep out of Jules’s narration.

Her insights remain on the banal level of “I didn’t understand that things change. Someone should warn you.” She is just as fixated on Ian as Carla but in a whiny way, and her Jewish heritage is flimsy window-dressing (as is Carla’s Italian background).

Jules seethes at always being upstaged by Carla.

As Carla takes over events and Ian, she also takes over the narrative. She is a force of nature and progresses beyond the laughs at her expense to admiration for her gumption, energy and passion. There proves to be more to Carla … and less to Jules.

Their rivalry is acted on and out during the drama class production of Hamlet.

The overlong novel chronologically chugs along, the narrative equivalent of oversharing, playing out with no surprises in its revelations of plot or character.

Sherie Posesorski is a Metro Vancouver freelance writer.

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Young Adult Fiction: On the road and treading the boards

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